The Question

The question “why is there something something rather than nothing?” is not an argument, obviously. It’s a question. It’s relationship to the cosmological argument for the existence for God is as an entree, a taster. It’s supposed to get you thinking about existence.

Imagine two parties. At one is everything that actually exists (or has existed) – the “actual” party. At the other, everything that could exist – the “possible” party. Horses are at both parties, unicorns only the possible party. Why? Because of something at the actual party, in this case the evolutionary ancestors of the horse. When something moves from possible to actual, it’s because of an invitation from the actual party. Those in the possible party can’t crash the actual party. They don’t exist, and so don’t have any causal powers, so can’t make anything actually happen.

So this actual party – did everyone get their invitation off someone else? Is there an infinite regress of inviters? It can’t form a loop – I invite you and you invite me – because that’s just crashing the party. Could there be a party where everyone must be invited by someone who’s already there? Why is anyone at the party? Why does anything exist?

Not the Question

Aside: The question is not: “something came from nothing. How could that happen?”, to which the answer is supposedly: because God can make something out of nothing. That confuses the contingency argument with the Kalam argument. The question is “Why is there something rather than nothing?”. The answer is: God is a necessary being, so it is not possible for there to be nothing. God must exist.

Nothing, Naturally

Carroll discusses the question “why is there something rather than nothing?” in this blog post. Amongst other things, he discusses the claim that “nothingness is uniquely natural”, so that we need some special reason why something exists. He argues that we have no basis for such a conclusion, as our intuitions for naturalness and simplicity are based on our experience in this world, and so don’t automatically apply to the universe itself.

However, most versions of the cosmological argument don’t explicitly appeal to the naturalness of nothing. Carroll, following Grunbaum, discusses Swinburne. In Grunbaum’s paper “Why is There a World AT ALL, Rather Than Just Nothing?”, he quotes Swinburne: “It remains to me, as to so many who have thought about the matter, a source of extreme puzzlement that there should exist anything at all” (pg. 336). I think, however, they’ve missed the point of what Swinburne is saying. (I say this with some trepidation. Grunbaum is a professional philosopher, and something of a legend. Fools rush in …) (more…)

Before all that: Sean has linked to my previous post about this debate. Just to be clear, I don’t think Sean needs much advice. I’m really using these posts as an excuse to discuss Carroll’s ideas. He knows the arguments, knows the cosmology, has a clear idea about what naturalism is and how to defend it, and is an excellent public speaker. Carroll’s arguments are interesting and relevant, and Craig’s response won’t be anything as basic as “here’s a Grammar 101 lesson on using terms of negation and indefinite pronouns.”

Long post ahead. The short story: Carroll needs to make clear his objection to the Craig’s version of the principle of sufficient reason. In particular, why think that the universe is an exception (perhaps the only exception) to the general trend that things exist for a reason?

Craig’s Version of the Argument

The cosmological argument for the existence of God has been defended through the ages by a who’s who of thinkers: Plato, Aristotle, Al-Kindi, Ibn Sina, Al-Ghazali, Maimonides, Aquinas, Scotus, Spinoza, Leibnitz, … Of course, it has also been critiqued, most famously by Hume and Kant. The debate continues. Craig’s version of the contingency argument goes like this.

Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence (either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause).

If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God.

The universe exists.

It follows from these premises that God exists (homework). Note that this argument has nothing to do with whether the universe has a beginning.

Some atheists (Lawrence Krauss in particular) object to the second premise, thinking that God is just crowbarred in, an ad hoc assumption. But premise 2 has its own argument:

4. Since the universe is the totality of space, time, matter and energy (i.e. that’s the sense of universe being used here), the cause of the universe must be spaceless, timeless, and immaterial.5. The most plausible immaterial kind of thing that could cause a universe is a mind.6. A spaceless, timeless, and immaterial mind that causes the universe deserves to be called God.

Premise 5, in turn, has its own argument based on the causal effeteness of abstract entities. If you want to go after premise 2, you need to deal with this argument. Krauss didn’t.

Getting slightly ahead of myself, Carroll seems to object to Premise 1. This premise is a version of the infamous Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR). It is a mild version, applying only to things, not to all (contingent) truths. Craig argues for premise 1, or at least that the universe is not an exception to premise 1, as follows.

It would be arbitrary for the atheist to claim that the universe is the exception to the rule. Merely increasing the size of the object to be explained, even until it becomes the universe itself, does nothing to remove the need for some explanation of its existence.

Alexander Pruss has advanced arguments for a version of the PSR along these lines. (I’m paraphrasing, dangerously).

8. If the universe could exist without explanation, then it would be inexplicable why just anything couldn’t exist without explanation. In other words, why is only the universe an exception to premise 1?9. Universal principles are simpler than principles that apply to an arbitrary subset. The simplest explanation of fact that contingent things typically have explanations is that all contingent things have explanations.

Carroll’s Case

Let’s consider with what Carroll’s response might be, as gleaned from this reply to an op-ed piece by Paul Davies.

“[A]t first glance, it seems plausible that there could be [an] answer to the question of why the laws of physics take the form they do. But there isn’t. At least, there isn’t any as far as we know, and there’s certainly no reason why there must be. The more mundane “why” questions make sense because they refer to objects and processes that are embedded in larger systems of cause and effect. … The universe (in the sense of “the entire natural world,” not only the physical region observable to us) isn’t like that. It’s not embedded in a bigger structure; it’s all there is. We are lulled into asking “why” questions about the universe by sloppily extending the way we think about local phenomena to the whole shebang. What kind of answers could we possibly be expecting? … [The correct possibility seems to be] that’s just how things are. There is a chain of explanations concerning things that happen in the universe, which ultimately reaches to the fundamental laws of nature and stops. This is a simple hypothesis that fits all the data; until it stops being consistent with what we know about the universe, the burden of proof is on any alternative idea for why the laws take the form they do.”

Let’s break it down. Lurking in the background of this entire discussion is this question: what makes an explanation an ultimate explanation? What is it about this explanation that makes another iteration of “and why?” out-of-bounds? Carroll’s argument seems to be:

10. Chains of explanations have to end somewhere.
11. Once we arrive at a simple explanation that fits all the data, there is nothing to be gained by going any further. Such an explanation should be considered an ultimate “stopping-point” explanation.
12. The fundamental laws of nature are just such an explanation for the physical universe.
13. Thus, we should consider the fundamental laws of nature to be the ultimate explanation of the universe.

I don’t know who Rob Sheldon is, but he doesn’t know much about cosmology. He recently was quoted in this post at uncommondescent.com regarding the geometry of the universe. If I lecture cosmology this year, I’ll set this passage as an assignment: find all the mistakes. It gets more wrong than right. I have an article for “Australian Physics” on common questions about cosmology that I’ll post here once it’s out (a fortnight, maybe). In the meantime, I’ll try to clear up a few things.

The discussion of the mathematics of curvature (flat, positive, negative) is about right. It’s when he discusses the universe that things go wrong.

It takes a lot of effort to find any curvature at all, and certainly it is difficult to get good agreement between different types of measurement.

Nope. That’s why it’s called the “concordance model of cosmology” – because the different measurements converge on the same set of cosmological parameters. For example, this plot.

Flat and negatively curved universes can be finite. A flat 3-torus, for example, is finite, unbounded and has a flat geometry. Einstein’s general relativity constrains the geometry of the universe but not its topology. (more…)